FAUX Makes Into the Front Row @WH Press Briefing Room

March 2009 Seating Chart for White House Press Corp

Steve Benen:

To be sure, this isn't exactly important news, and squabbling over seating assignments seems pretty silly for adults. But if there's a disappointment here, it's that Fox News is being treated as a legitimate, professional journalistic enterprise, and it shouldn't be. It will join a front-row with credible media powerhouses -- ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Reuters, and AP -- producing a rather powerful "one of these things is not like the other" moment.

Fox News is a propaganda outlet, a detail everyone seems to know, but which is apparently impolite to say out loud. The network's proponents will likely argue a front-row seat is warranted because Fox News has a lot of viewers. Perhaps. But Milli Vanilli sold a lot of records, and success didn't make them legitimate recording artists.
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Howie P.S.: "Important news," or not? In other Beltway news, Taegan Goddard asks whether the U.S. Senate really is "The World's Greatest Deliberative Body?" as he quotes from a New Yorker piece by George Packer that "sketched a portrait of the contemporary senator who is too busy to think." Meanwhile, I continue my obsession with Paris while John Aravosis continues his annual house-sitting summer vacation there.